Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and short take-off and landing (STOL) aircraft may employ vectorable nozzles and deflect the flow and gas from the propulsion engine. The invention is concerned with aircraft of this kind in which the engine exit nozzles include an array or cascade of vanes to vector engine thrust.
A cascade nozzle of the kind referred to is the subject of co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/084,706 filed Jun. 25, 1993 now U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,877, issued Feb. 21, 1995. In this arrangement a vane cascade or deflector array is pivotally mounted beneath a lift fan or lift engine to serve, in use, as means for vectoring lift thrust. An array of parallel vanes extends between opposite sides of a supporting frame. Each of the vanes has a smooth, one-piece surface made of flexible sheet material which are connected to pivoted levers at either end housed in the frame. Thus, by moving the levers the camber of the vanes may be changed without the use of hinged joints.
The present invention seeks to avoid the sliding abutment of the inner faces of the vane surfaces at the trailing edge of the vanes, and also to avoid the multiplicity of sliding interfaces in the mechanical link system interconnecting the vanes.
The object of the present invention is to provide a mechanism for changing the camber of multi-part vanes of the type referred to.